OR, WHAT IS SENSUOUS PRACTICE?
The elaboration of Marx’s aesthetics faces a fundamental problem: Marx never wrote on aesthetics. Of course, he was a cultured intellectual with a profound artistic sensibility, and his writings are littered with remarks on art, not to mention the literary mode of his texts themselves. However, as for an aesthetic theory, there is very little to go on. One may make the most of what there is and elaborate the consequences of his fragmentary remarks, but this is a formidable and precarious task. There remains another approach, a more fundamental solution: that Marx did in fact write an aesthetics, disclosed in his early writings on sensibility. All that is required, therefore, is to recognize this hidden treasure and bring it to light. This fundamental problem and solution has framed much of the tradition of Marxist aesthetics, at least since these early writings were first published in the 1920s and 30s.1
And yet, a further problem appears within this frame, no less fundamental: Marx’s early understanding of sensibility is written in the shadow of Ludwig Feuerbach. Therefore, the essential sources of his aesthetics, above all his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, are indebted to a philosophy from which he unequivocally breaks in the flashes of insight constituting his so-called ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Yet again, we face a formidable and precarious task of sifting through what remains after this explosion in Marx’s thought. Much of what he wrote about sensibility is ruined and must be abandoned in pursuit of his radicalized conception of practice. But a few fragments remain, a few clues, above all Marx’s commitment to a practice that is sensuous, a sensuous practice, that emerges as a new principle of his thought. But what is this exactly? What are its consequences? And what is the new conception of sensibility and perhaps aesthetics that it inaugurates? These are the questions this essay addresses. They may appear to be familiar. Certainly, no one has been able to read Marx’s ‘Manuscripts’ without the horizon of his critique of Feuerbach. This remains nonetheless a matter of intense controversy. In any case, what is original to these questions can be made evident only by grasping the profound problems from which they emerge.
Let us start with the issue of Marx’s debt to Feuerbach. Self-evidently, we will have no chance of understanding the nature of Marx’s break with Feuerbach – both its character and its depth – without understanding his investment in, even identification with, his forerunner. Marx outlines his unreserved commitment to Feuerbach’s philosophy in greatest detail in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (hereafter ‘Manuscripts’) as follows:
Feuerbach’s great achievement is:
(1) To have shown that philosophy is nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed in thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of the estrangement of man’s nature.
(2) To have founded true materialism and real science by making the social relation of ‘man to man’ the basic principle of his theory.
(3) To have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positively grounded in itself.
Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic, and in so doing justifies taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting point.2
Here we can read Marx’s emphatic commitment to Feuerbach’s conception of sensibility. It appears as only one of three interrelated debts, but, as will become evident, it is a pivot around which revolves Marx’s whole project to follow Feuerbach into an alternative philosophical world to that occupied by Hegel and left Hegelianism. However, within a year, in the spring of 1845, we can see in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (hereafter ‘Theses’) a withdrawal from or, rather, transformation of each of these commitments in the attempt to radicalize his conception of the reality of practice. Understanding these transformations therefore provides an invaluable key to understanding Marx’s originality and its consequences for all that came before and after this revolution in his thought.
Starting with the first point, concerning religion, it is theses 4, 6 and 7 that stand out. In thesis 4, Marx writes:
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and practice.3
This thesis does not appear to depart from Marx’s debt to Feuerbach, since it concerns the ‘secular world’ rather than philosophy. And even if we read the ‘fact of religious self-estrangement’ as referring to Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy – namely, that it restores religious estrangement – then Marx appears to reaffirm this fact. Nonetheless, a new and more fundamental starting point is announced: the fact of secular self-estrangement, or the estrangement within the secular basis itself. This transformation is derived from a consequence of Feuerbach’s argument. If religion is an estrangement that is produced by its secular basis, then why does the secular basis produce this estrangement in the first place? This is not explained by the critique of religion as estrangement; that only presupposes estrangement. It must be explained by the critique of the secular basis, its contradictions and how they produce estranged forms such as religion. In fact, without such a critique there has been no substantive critique of religion. Marx hereby subjects Feuerbach to the same criticism that he makes of left Hegelianism in general.
This criticism is extended in thesis 7, where we can also see Marx withdrawing from his second debt to Feuerbach concerning the social: ‘Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.’ However, it is thesis 6 that exposes the conceptual basis of Marx’s objections by introducing his decisive criticism of Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen or genus-being:
Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged:
(1) To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment [Gemüt] by itself, and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
(2) Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as ‘genus’ [Gattung], as inner, mute, which unites the many individuals in a natural way.4
Clearly, these three theses unequivocally contradict Marx’s prior debt. Suddenly, Feuerbach is transformed from the philosopher of the social into a philosopher of the abstract individual. This claim is in many ways more contentious than the first. There is an obvious sense in which Feuerbach did not pursue the kind of criticism of the secular world that Marx pursues in his critique of political economy – which, it should be noted, Marx had been pursuing before the ‘Theses’ under the auspices of a contribution to and extension of Feuerbach’s insights. With respect to the social, however, we face a direct conflict testified to by a struggle over the same terms. Feuerbach had declared in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future that: ‘The highest and last principle of philosophy is … the unity of man with man.’5 And Marx was evidently thinking of just such a claim when he was outlining his debt to Feuerbach in the ‘Manuscripts’. So how are we to understand Marx’s volte-face in the ‘Theses’?
The pivot may be located in the idea of Gattungswesen. This is an idea that Marx had deployed throughout his attempt to elaborate a historical and social conception of man in the ‘Mnuscripts’. So its rejection in thesis 6 is no less dramatic than the criticism of Feuerbach’s conception of the social. But the fact that Marx is seemingly prepared to abandon the term Gattungswesen indicates that it is the source of what he objects to. And, indeed, this is confirmed when we examine Feuerbach’s own words. The introduction to The Essence of Christianity, reads as follows:
Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his genus [Gattung], his essentiality [Wesenheit], is an object. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual – and he has accordingly the feeling of self – but not as genus-object [Gattung Gegenstand]: hence, he is without that consciousness which derives its name from science. Where there is this consciousness, there is a capability of science. Science is the consciousness of genera [Bewußtsein der Gattungen]. In life we have to do with individuals, in science with genera. But only a being to whom his own genus, his own essentiality, is an object, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought.6
What is evident here is that Feuerbach does not say that the essence of man is revealed socially or historically. Rather, man’s essence is revealed by a distinctive capacity of consciousness to apprehend itself not as an individual but as a genus, that is, as a generic or universal being. To the extent that this being is universal, it discloses the universality within which all beings exist. In other words, the apprehension of nature by consciousness is the apprehension of the condition of all natural beings. And this is possible because consciousness is not an individual or specific apprehension, but a universal or abstract apprehension. Hence, Marx’s objections are confirmed. Gattungswesen is disclosed to consciousness as such, as the capacity of universalization or abstraction by man in general, regardless of his social and historical relations. The unity of man and man is therefore ‘natural’ or a function of coexistence within a natural universe. Feuerbach does not say that this is the capacity of an isolated individual, but since consciousness is not determined socially it is effectively isolated.
As has already been mentioned, Marx’s ‘Manuscripts’ contain extensive passages that do little else than paraphrase or improvise around the idea of Gattungswesen. Given the problems the ‘Theses’ expose, the question arises of what can be salvaged, if anything, from these passages? In the critical light cast back by the ‘Theses’, it is evident that the ‘Manuscripts’ discern a contradiction between abstract consciousness and Gattungswesen. Thus, Marx objects that ‘universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such in hostile opposition to it’.7 And yet, he opposes this abstract consciousness to Gattungswesen. This tension is evident in his proposition of a speculative identity of ‘genus-consciousness’ and ‘genus-being’: ‘As genus-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats in thought his actual existence; conversely, genus-being confirms itself in genus-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being.’8 The problem here may be attributed to Feuerbach himself, for there is a change in his writings, from The Essence of Christianity to his later more polemical works, such as the Principles, which are orientated to an intensified critique of abstract consciousness and Hegel through recourse to sensibility. It seems likely that Marx’s ‘Manuscripts’ were influenced by this later phase of Feuerbach’s writing. However, what Marx’s ‘Theses’ expose is not a distinction between early and late Feuerbach, but rather a radical critique of his thought as a whole. This means that, however influenced Marx was by Feuerbach’s critique of abstract consciousness, he decides in the ‘Theses’ that Feuerbach’s alternative of sensuous consciousness offers no real alterative: that it is still abstract, still presupposes the abstraction of all beings in the disclosure of being in general, since it is only in the space of this abstraction that the objective, or sensuous, or anything that is opposed to consciousness, can appear.
The critique of Gattungswesen therefore provides an invaluable introduction to the issues surrounding the third of Marx’s debts to Feuerbach: namely, his commitment to the ‘sensuously ascertained’. It also introduces us to the decisive issues surrounding Marx’s radicalized conception of practice, which is presented as a new mode of sensibility opposed to Feuerbach. This is stated most concisely in thesis 5: ‘Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants intuition [Anschauung]; but he does not conceive of sensuousness as practical human-sensuous activity.’9 Marx does not therefore abandon sensuousness altogether, but rather its intuitive or conscious mode. What is at stake here is intimated further by the complex propositions of the first thesis:
The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt], or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth but abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In The Essence of Christianity, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.10
Clearly, the ‘Manuscripts’ had also sought a theory of the reality of practice. What has changed, therefore, is not so much the end as the means. Suddenly, Marx sees Feuerbach’s sensuous materialism as just another obstacle to grasping the reality of practice, even worse than idealism.
In order to demonstrate Marx’s realization here it is worth looking at his reference to Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which is ostensibly to the chapter on ‘The Significance of the Creation in Judaism’. Here we find thi s striking passage:
The standpoint of theory is the standpoint of harmony with the world. The subjective activity in which man contents himself and allows himself free play is the sensuous imagination [sinnliche Einbildungskraft] alone. Satisfied with this, he lets Nature subsist in peace, and constructs his castles in the air, his poetical cosmogonies, only out of natural materials. When, on the contrary, man places himself only on the practical standpoint and looks at the world from thence, making the practical standpoint the theoretical one also, he is in disunion with Nature; he makes Nature the abject vassal of his selfish interest, of his practical egoism. The theoretic expression of this egotistical, practical view, according to which Nature is in itself nothing, is this: Nature or the world is made, created, the product of a command…. Utilitarianism, use, is the essential principle of Judaism.11
The consistency of this passage with Feuerbach’s own on Gattungswesen quoted above is evident. Practice limits nature, does not allow it to stand objectively in its independent universality, and instead reduces it to individual interest, something created in order to be useful. It is rather the theoretical standpoint that grasps the object of nature as a whole, and it does so by abstaining from practice. Sensuous imagination, the essential faculty of artistic production since Kant, which is free from interest, is therefore proto-theoretical for Feuerbach: ‘for the theoretic view was originally the aesthetic view, the prima philosophia’.12
The full extent of Marx’s need to turn away from Feuerbach is now exposed. Far from offering a route to a theory of practice, beyond Hegel, Feuerbach is a cul-de-sac from which Marx must turn back and start again. Feuerbach’s whole orientation towards nature, towards the sensuous object, is revealed to be opposed to practice, to be theoretical, since the sensuous objectivity of nature only appears within the abstract space opened up by theoretical consciousness, which is characterized by its withdrawal from any individuality or specific practical interest. Feuerbach’s sensualism is therefore misunderstood if it is simply opposed to theory or consciousness – even if this is a confusion that Feuerbach himself often generated. The sensible, the individual or even the practical interests are not excluded from theory in so far as they are included in the generic space of nature that a universal consciousness discloses. But this inclusion presupposes an abstraction that is the act of consciousness, not activity itself. To conceive of sensuousness, individuality or practice independently of this abstraction of consciousness requires an altogether different approach.
Having realized this, Marx begins afresh. But his new starting point is a stumbling block. He recognizes that intuition and objectivity (‘the form of the object’) are theoretical, not practical, and that he must turn against Feuerbach’s sensualism. And yet, he goes on to describe practice as both objective and, repeatedly, sensuous. How are we to negotiate these apparently contradictory claims? Is this pivotal moment in Marx’s self-understanding also one of theoretical confusion, perhaps even of collapse?
In broad strategic terms, Marx’s alternative is obvious. He realizes that Feuerbach does not offer him a theory of practice or, rather, of the reality of practice. He then realizes that idealism offers him a theory of the reality of practice in the mode of the constitutive subject, whose activity constitutes itself and its world. But he maintains his critique of idealism – that it is abstract theory, or abstract mental labour. Evidently, sensuousness and objectivity are his terminological markers for an activity that is not idealist, not abstract. This much is clear. But still, how are we to grapple with the contradictions these markers generate? How can objectivity be a mode of intuition or non-practical materialism, and yet remain the measure of real practice, as opposed to idealism? And what of the fact that sensuousness is typically a mode of passivity, not activity? It is as such that Feuerbach opposes it to the activity of idealism, and Hegel would agree to disagree. Is not the idea of a sensuous activity simply a contradiction in terms?
We can make more substantive sense of Marx’s goal by considering how he argues for the reality of practice elsewhere. Let us take the example he offers in his elaboration of his critique of Feuerbach in The German Ideology: a cherry tree. The reality of a cherry tree may appear to reside in its objectivity, which we grasp as something beyond ourselves, independent of ourselves, and which we therefore grasp most appropriately through sensibility, that is, through our passive reception of it as a reality existing independently of us. This certainly differs from Hegel, for whom the reality of the tree resides in our knowledge of it, since the cherry tree exists only to the extent that the concept ‘cherry tree’ adequately determines the sensations appearing to consciousness. In these terms, the tree’s reality is generated through an activity or practice of consciousness that knows or conceptualizes what it senses. However, for Marx, the reality of the tree resides in the fact that it is a product of human activity. That is, in the sense that it is transplanted and maintained by human labour, by human industry. If it were not for this activity, there would be no cherry tree for Feuerbach to sense.13 Nor would there be a tree for Hegel to know, and producing knowledge of the cherry tree does not amount to producing the cherry tree.
Reality is therefore practical, produced and reproduced by human labour on nature. This means that reality is historical to the degree that history is the course of this activity of production, the evolution of different ways or modes in which these activities transform nature from something external to human activity to something increasingly internal to it. Marx even concedes that Feuerbach’s approach may be appropriate to pre-historical nature, where nature is independent from human action, but that such nature is increasingly marginal to the modern world in which Feuerbach lives.14
Hence we can see how the practical transformation of sensibility underpins Marx’s other criticisms of Feuerbach. To approach reality as practice is to approach it as produced through history and the social relations that individuals enter into in order to produce and reproduce their lives throughout history. To approach reality as merely sensuous is to treat it as an externality appearing to man. Man is therefore abstracted from any historical or social determination, and the sensuousness or objectivity of the object effectively presupposes an abstract man, a consciousness that takes a theoretical standpoint, not a practical standpoint.
Feuerbach suddenly ceases to present an alternative to Hegel. He even regresses behind him, for Hegel had grasped the constitution of objectivity by consciousness as an activity, which indeed reduces the world to something created by man. Feuerbach suppresses this by treating objectivity as a natural or independent reality that consciousness only exposes to view or contemplates.
But with this realization of what Feuerbach and Hegel share, the task facing Marx is clarified: the critique of abstraction as a critique of consciousness as such. Whereas previously Marx had pursued this through Feuerbach’s critique of idealism, he now realizes that Feuerbach and idealism are both forms of abstraction inasmuch as they are both philosophies of consciousness. Feuerbach’s investment in sensuousness is not enough, in itself, to overcome the abstraction of reality by consciousness. Sensuous particularity, however insistent, remains a phenomenon within the abstraction that consciousness generates by separating itself from sensuousness. Ironically, Feuerbach’s very act of apprehending the object as real, in opposition to the human consciousness that apprehends it, reduces the object to a determination of the abstract realm of objectivity constituted by consciousness, namely, as what is opposed to consciousness. Feuerbach wants to avoid just this problem by counterposing abstract consciousness to sensuous consciousness, but the abstraction is generated by the very infinitude of otherness that consciousness establishes as its field of objectivity, and since sensuousness appears within this field it is constituted by this act of abstraction.
Henceforth, the task of grasping the reality of practice is premised on the critique not only of abstract consciousness, but of sensuous consciousness too – that is, a fundamental critique of consciousness as such. The ‘Theses’ only appear to shuttle endlessly between Feuerbach and Hegel in so far as this new opposition of practice to consciousness is not grasped. This radicalized critique of consciousness characterizes Marx’s progress into The German Ideology, generating its axiomatic propositions:
Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process.15
It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.16
The first historical act is … the production of the means to satisfy … needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.17
However, if the problem with Feuerbach’s philosophy of sensuous consciousness is now exposed, and thereby the negative conditions of Marx’s alternative conception of sensuous practice, we have yet to directly consider the other side to all this, namely, Hegel. Indeed, without understanding Marx’s relation to Hegel we cannot fully grasp either his relation to Feuerbach or the originality of his conception of practice. To this end, it is instructive to extend our critical review of the ‘Manuscripts’ and consider Marx’s critique of Hegel’s concept of labour there, since this offers one of the most illuminating elaborations of the ambivalence Marx displays in the first thesis towards the idealist conception of activity. The following passage from the ‘Manuscripts’ is seminal:
The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result – the dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle – lies in the fact that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as de-objectification [die Vergegenständlichung als Entgegenständlichung], as alienation and as supersession of this alienation; that he therefore grasps the nature of labour and conceives objective man – true, because real man – as the result of his own labour.18
This investment in Hegel’s ‘importance’ – that Hegel grasps the nature of labour, and the nature of man as ‘the result of his own labour’ – presents an immediate problem when compared to Marx’s outline of his debt to Feuerbach. Marx’s third point claimed that Feuerbach’s importance was ‘[t]o have opposed to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the positive which is based upon itself and positively grounded in itself ’19 – which is to say, the ‘sensuously ascertained’.20 Furthermore, Marx goes on to endorse the fact that Feuerbach ‘conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself, as philosophy which affirms theology’.21 However, here above, in Marx’s outline of Hegel’s importance, he commends the negation of the negation. It is no longer philosophy’s self-contradiction, but rather the essence of labour and hence of man.
This tension raises a question over the necessity of alienation as a moment of, or passage to, realization or dealienation. How is this possible in terms of the absolutely positive? Surely, the absolutely positive admits of no process, no alienation? This is a philosophically decisive issue, but it is apparently dissolved easily enough by Marx’s procedure. This is revealed in Marx’s claim that Feuerbach ‘justifies taking the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting point’.22 In other words, the contention is not to oppose positivity to process, but to oppose the positive or sensuous to the abstract as the starting point of the process. Marx is saying, in opposition to Feuerbach, that Hegel: (1) starts with the abstract or religion, (2) negates this through positing the sensuous and the objective as alienation, and then (3) negates this negation by restoring abstraction or philosophy/religion. Now if we reconstruct this process taking the positive-sensuous as the starting point, then we have: (1) the sensuous, in which man exists in an unrealized or limited form, (2) the negation of the sensuous, as a moment of objectification and alienation of man, and then (3) the negation of this negation, as the dealienation or realization of man.
Two things should be noted about this alternative dialectic. First, objectification is a negation or externalization of sensuousness for Marx, whereas for Hegel it is a negation or externalization of consciousness. Second, because sensuousness is the starting point and objectification is, following dialectical logic, not merely the externalization or alienation of sensuousness, but also the expression of sensuousness, this means that the supersession of alienation is a return to sensuousness, not consciousness. In other words, it is because the subject or starting point of labour is not consciousness but sensuousness that the overcoming of its alienation is not the overcoming of its sensuousness in self-consciousness, but the expansion or realization of sensuousness. To the extent that objectivity is understood as a form of sensuousness, it is differentiated from alienation as such, and is absent from neither the starting point nor the finishing point. This explains Marx’s famous critique of Hegel’s conception of alienation:
The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object. (The positing of man = self-consciousness.)
It is therefore a question of surmounting the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is seen as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to human nature, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced in the form of estrangement as something alien, therefore means transcending not only estrangement but also objectivity. That is to say, man is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.23
At this point, defenders of Hegel typically point out that Marx is wrong to claim that self-consciousness is non-objective or spiritual. And they are certainly right inasmuch as Hegel distinguishes his ‘absolute idealism’ from ‘subjective idealism’ by precisely this point that absolute self-consciousness is determined by objectivity. However, it is evident that Marx knows this, and acknowledges it above in his claim that the object, for Hegel, is ‘objectified self-consciousness’. A defender of Hegel might persist by claiming that Marx is wrong to claim that: ‘The only labour Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labour.’24 Hegel certainly does know labour that produces the objective world, not just its knowledge. Indeed, this is explicit in Hegel’s account of the movement of objective spirit. It is also evident in his Philosophy of Right, where he conceives of private property as a product of free will and its labour, which, dialectically, is both the alienation and the realization of free will. But again, Marx knows this. The absence of Marx’s commentary on Hegel’s passages on labour in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right is more than unfortunate. (Marx’s ‘Critique of the Doctrine of the State’ starts from paragraph 261, after these passages, which are located in Hegel’s discussion of ‘The System of Needs’, paragraphs 189–208, and particularly paragraphs 196–8.) But these passages reveal what Marx addresses explicitly in the ‘Manuscripts’, namely, that:
Hegel adopts the standpoint of modern political economy. He sees labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man; he sees only the positive and not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation or as an alienated man.25
Marx’s critique of Hegel in terms of political economy is certainly instructive. Marx’s basic objection to political economy revolves around its uncritical relation to wage labour, which is for him the fundamental form that labour takes under the conditions of private property. Wage labour enables the buyer of labour to put it to work in exchange for a wage that substitutes the value of what labour produces by a lower value. The wage therefore transforms the labour process from a process in which labour realizes itself, into a process in which labour is derealized or alienated from what it produces. It thereby institutes, and accumulates, the alienation of labour from both its products and the means to produce and reproduce itself.
Hegel’s labour of consciousness is obviously not the same thing as wage labour. But they are homologous. Wage labour produces objects, and thereby produces and reproduces the human world. As such, it does not just concern ‘abstract knowledge’. However, the wage labourer returns to his or her life after work without the objects s/he produced, only with a wage instead, which is an abstract representation of the value of his or her labour, and which is worth less than the value s/he produced. Moreover, the wage labourer even returns home with a sense of relief that s/he is no longer at work, that life away from work is true life, since work is not a realization of life but merely a means to it. The wage labourer’s life is therefore homologous to the philosophical life described by Hegel, returning to itself from labour and alienation. So Marx’s critique of Hegel is not just directed at the abstract labour of consciousness, but at its reproduction of the abstract labour of wage labour.
This does much to clarify Marx’s alternative conception of labour, or at least what is at stake within it. However, there remains a residual but significant ambiguity. It is in many ways obvious that Marx is seeking to overcome alienated labour. Indeed, at points he even suggests that labour itself must be overcome for it is intrinsically alienated. And yet, he often treats alienation as a necessary stage of this process. This is evident in his criticism of Hegel’s conception of labour. Concluding the passage on the Phenomenology’s ‘importance’, quoted above, Marx writes:
The real, active relation of man to himself as a genus-being, or the realization of himself as a real genus-being, i.e. as a human being, is only possible if he really employs all his genus-powers – which again is only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of history – and treats them as objects, which is at first only possible in the form of estrangement.26
Note: ‘only possible’. And this claim is ostensibly reproduced in his repeated arguments for the need for, or productivity of, capital in generating the conditions for its overcoming or communism. Political or historical objections may be, and have been, made to the latter claim. But in the circuit of texts and ideas we have been examining here a philosophical objection may be raised. Namely, given the centrality of alienation to Hegel’s conception of labour, how can this be maintained by Marx’s alternative conception of labour, or sensuous practice? Indeed, can Marx maintain his critique of the abstract labour of consciousness, and of wage labour, while retaining a logic of alienation? In other words, if alienation is not a separation of subjectivity from objectivity – if, that is, the sensuous subject of labour is not alienated from the sensuousness of objectivity in this sense – can it still be properly described as alienation or estrangement?
This problem is in many ways concealed by Marx’s approach to it as a passing historical phase, or in its somewhat suspended existence as an object of criticism. Marx criticizes alienated labour, projecting an alternative, but simultaneously maintains it in so far as its alternative is projected into a future that will emerge only through the passage of alienated labour. But does he continue to presuppose elements that he nonetheless criticizes? In a way we might ask whether Marx has produced a similar problem to that which he diagnoses in Feuerbach and left Hegelianism as a whole: does he produce a critique of alienated labour in terms of non-alienated labour, but without elaborating non-alienated labour or how it generates alienated labour?
This suspicion returns us to the scrutiny of what is meant by sensuous practice. This can be advanced by extending our consideration of Marx’s critique of Hegel via an inquiry into Hegel’s own conception of sensation, since this offers a clarification of how alienation is integral to consciousness for Hegel. Moreover, it offers us a clarification of how sensation opposes both consciousness and alienation. To start with, it should be recognized that Marx’s proposition that man becomes objective through starting out from sensation, rather than consciousness, makes no sense in Hegel’s terms, since, for Hegel, the objective is a phenomenon of consciousness. Conversely, for Hegel, sensation as such admits of no objectivity. What distinguishes sensation from consciousness for Hegel is that sensation relates to what it senses as its own reality. Pure sensation is characterized by an immediate particularity, which generates distinctiveness but not separation between sense and what is sensed. As Hegel puts it: ‘what I sense, I am, and what I am, I sense’.27 This means that the differentiation of a subjective sphere from an objective sphere is not known to sensation. It is known only to consciousness, which is thereby categorically distinct from sensation. Hegel elaborates this as follows:
Mere sensation … has to do only with what is individual and contingent, with what is immediately given and present; and this content appears to the sentient soul as its own concrete reality. When by contrast I rise to the standpoint of consciousness, I enter into relationship with a world outside me, with an objective totality, with an internally interconnected sphere of manifold and complex objects confronting me. As objective consciousness, I certainly have initially an immediate sensation, but at the same time what is thus sensed is for me a point in the universal interconnection of things, something, therefore, which points out beyond its sensory individuality and immediate presence.28
In other words, objectivity is a product of consciousness in the sense that it is consciousness that produces the separation of subjectivity from objectivity. Far from contradicting consciousness, objectivity can only be objective – that is, standing against subjectivity – to the extent that it stands in the space produced by consciousness. Consciousness can be conscious of sensations, but these are then determined according to a differentiation of subjectivity and objectivity. Thus, consciousness relates to sensation as the index of an inner or outer object. Mere sensation knows no objectivity, it merely ‘knows’ a manifold of sensations without objectivity or subjectivity. In this sense, the attribution of externality that is often given to sensation, including by Hegel, is an externality to consciousness, not to sensation itself. Perhaps most significantly of all here, consciousness’s separation of itself as a subject from everything that it is not presupposes an abstraction. Everything is reduced to the abstract determination of being as opposed to consciousness, that is, as being objective. In other words, for Hegel, consciousness constitutes objectivity as an abstract realm or world, and it is only within this world that objects, as such, appear.
Now, to the degree that Hegel’s account of sensation holds, it clarifies a number of characteristics of his philosophy and the problems it presents to both Feuerbach and Marx. It clarifies how objectivity is not opposed to the abstraction of consciousness, but rather derives from it. It also clarifies how sensuousness is not opposed to this abstraction in so far as it is apprehended by consciousness. Thus, it clarifies both why Marx needs to radicalize his critique of sensuous consciousness to a critique of consciousness as such – that it is only through this that he will overcome abstraction – and why he might nonetheless be right to retain sensuousness as a quality of practice that is irreducible to the practice of consciousness. Finally, it clarifies why alienation presents such a decisive issue, since if alienation is understood to be the separation of subjectivity from objectivity, then it is evident how it is an act of consciousness. If it is not this separation, then what exactly are we dealing with? This question is only part of the major problem that still needs to be resolved, since it is by no means evident that pre- or non-conscious sensation grasps the reality of practice. We must therefore ask yet again: what is sensuous practice?
Perhaps the first thing to confront is the extent to which practice is irreducible to sensation. Marx describes practice as driven by needs, which he understands as forms of sensation. But surely needs, by definition, generate a space between themselves and their satisfaction. Is this space the abstract space of consciousness, its differentiation of itself from all that stands outside of it? But needs are surely specific. Consciousness would be perhaps a universal need. But then perhaps this is just the point at which need is changed categorically into something beyond itself. We might say that needs generate a space within the internality of pure sensation, but that this space does not separate subject from object – it is not an abstract space. Furthermore, it is a space that surely dissolves again with its satisfaction. (Indeed, this is why Hegel thinks that need and consumption cannot sustain the self-determining independence of objects.) But what of the means towards satisfying needs, which are definitive of labour for Marx (and Hegel)? Are not means precisely a further extension of this space between need and satisfaction? Does this extension extend to infinity, to the whole of being or nature? And yet, surely means are specific too, bound to the immanent process of needs and satisfactions. Means, like needs or satisfactions, may appear within a universal realm of objectivity disclosed by consciousness, but that does not mean that they themselves disclose such a realm, or that consciousness does anything other than recognize or represent their independent existence. To conceive of itself as a means, consciousness would perhaps be like conceiving of a universal tool, a tool that was the means to everything. And yet again, surely there is no such tool. A universal tool would cease to be a tool. All tools, all means, are specific. But what of labour itself? Isn’t labour itself such an impossibly universal tool? But surely this is yet again an abstraction of labour, which transforms it categorically into something beyond itself. Labour is surely always specific, always concrete, and never abstract except in the treatment of it from outside, from the vantage of consciousness or capital.
I offer these tentative remarks at a moment when I am nonetheless attempting to resolve these issues since it is difficult to present a resolution confirmed by Marx’s own writings. Whether this was due to Marx’s confusion or my own, his texts seem to equivocate when it comes to defining the independence of practice from the practice of consciousness. For example, when he describes human labour by distinguishing a bee from an architect, where the architect constructs his building first in his mind before he does so in reality, how are we meant to understand this in opposition to the labour of consciousness? Is it to the degree that the actual building is distinct from the potential building? But is actualization all that is at stake in the notion of sensuous labour? This would suggest that needs or purposes are objects of consciousness, which sounds reasonable, but how does this distinguish consciousness from practice?
A more profound example emerges when Marx formulates his account of abstract labour. How are we to understand this in terms of sensuous practice? How can labour be sensuous and yet abstract? How can labour present an alternative to the labour of consciousness if both are abstract? Marx says that the abstraction of labour is real, not just an idea. And yet its reality derives from the artificial reality of capital. Labour is always concrete, he maintains, always specific to needs, means and ends. Abstract labour exists not by the dissolution of this specificity, but by its suspension at another level of existence, the existence of capital, which itself exists only on the basis of labour in its concreteness. But, as with his early endorsement of the need for alienation, the distillation of labour power in abstract labour is presented by Marx as a liberating separation of traditional labour from its entwinement with nature, and the liberation of the needs and satisfactions that this enables. Are we to understand this merely as a disciplining of concrete labour that remains concrete throughout the abstractions of the wage and the value-form? Or, even if this is true, is this abstraction not constitutive of concrete labour, not only in organizing it under capital, but also in developing its richness as a prelude to communism? In other words, does not this abstraction ontologically transform labour and enable its liberation as free activity? The account of abstract labour may well present a profound contribution to Marx’s general theory of labour, for it generates a conception of abstraction out of the constitution of labour itself, rather than the consciousness of it. But it also requires careful scrutiny of the terms in which Marx differentiates practice from abstraction.
Probably the most spectacular example of Marx’s ambivalence over his conception of labour is presented by his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’. This text was written between the end of 1843 and the start of 1844, just before the composition of his ‘Manuscripts’, and so it comes before the revelations of his ‘Theses’. However, it presents such a dramatic and ironic presentation of the concept of practice that he is grappling with that it warrants attention. Its notoriety also gives us the opportunity to see how Marx’s ambivalence has infused his legacy. Marx presents the proletariat as the ‘universal class’, who promise to become the class of humanity, rather than simply another limited political class, inasmuch as they are the class that has nothing. We might say that the proletariat are the class of universal need. Having nothing, their needs are not specific but universal. Hence their satisfaction is not the emancipation of one class against the others, but the emancipation of all classes, of humanity. The revolutionary class is therefore generated through the abstraction of particular interests. We are now in a position to understand that this conception of politics presents the most dramatic embodiment of all the aspects of Feuerbach and Hegel that Marx will go on to oppose. The only question is whether, when Marx says he is addressing ‘Germans’ – whom he mocks as being unable to conceive of politics other than philosophically – does this ironic interpellation extend to the full awareness of the philosophical perversion it presents? Put simply, does Marx fully understand the irony? Does he present such a vivid image of the practice or politics of abstraction because he had grasped its alternative, and even to the degree that he could joke about it? Or because he had yet to grasp its alternative? What is nonetheless clear is that the idea of politics presented in this text profoundly contradicts the idea of revolutionary practice outlined in the ‘Theses’.
And what about aesthetics? We have grasped sensuous practice as the principle according to which Marx’s aesthetics must be elaborated – that is, if it is to be an aesthetics that is derived from what is essential and original to Marx, rather than Feuerbach or Hegel. And yet this task of elaboration, with all the further issues it harbours, still lies ahead. We have reached the end but we have yet to begin. But at least we have reached the beginning.
1 The research of Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács into Marx’s aesthetics on the basis of his early unpublished manuscripts and notebooks remains seminal here, despite their questionable orientation of it towards a theory of Socialist Realism. See in particular Lifshitz’s The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933), trans. Ralf B. Winn (Pluto Press: London, 1973); and Lukács’s ‘Marx and Engels on Aesthetics’ (1953), trans. Arthur D. Kahn, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (Merlin Press: London, 1970), pp. 61–88. For an approach derived more exclusively from Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, see Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (1965), trans. Maro Riofrancos (Merlin Press: London, 1974).
2 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), in his Early Writings, trans. G. Benton (Penguin: London, 1975), pp. 381–2.
3 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (from original version from Marx’s notebooks of 1845), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1976), p. 4. Henceforth all references to the ‘Theses’ refer to this text (pp. 3–5).
4 Marx, ‘Theses’. Here, as elsewhere, I have translated Gattung as ‘genus’ and Gattungswesen as ‘genus-being’, or left the German untranslated. The received rendering as ‘species’ or ‘species-being’ collapses the distinction between species and genus, which is especially misleading in so far as it suggests specificity rather than generality, thereby obscuring Marx’s objection to the abstraction of Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen. It may be noted that the English translation of thesis 6 tries to compensate for this by introducing ‘general character’, despite this being absent from Marx’s text or Engels’s edition of it.
5 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), trans. M. Vogel (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1986), § 63, p. 72.
6 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), trans. G. Eliot (Dover Publications: New York, 2008), p. 1 (translation altered).
7 Marx, ‘Manuscripts’, op. cit., p. 350.
8 Ibid., pp. 350–1.
9 Marx, ‘Theses’, op. cit. (translation altered).
10 Ibid. (translation altered).
11 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, op. cit., pp. 94–5 (translation altered).
12 Ibid., p. 94.
13 ‘The cherry-tree, like most fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.’ Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 39.
14 Ibid., p. 40.
15 Ibid., p. 36.
16 Ibid., p. 37.
17 Ibid., p. 42.
18 Marx, ‘Manuscripts’, op. cit., pp. 385–6 (translation altered).
19 Ibid., p. 381.
20 Ibid., p. 382.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., pp. 386–7.
24 Ibid., p. 386.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid. (translation altered).
27 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2007), § 402, p. 85.
28 Ibid., Zusatz to §402, p. 84.